Cracks In The Armor

The Question Is, Could The United States Win A War Today?

September 15, 1985|By James Coates and Michael Killian. James Coates and Michael Kilian are the authors of ``Heavy losses: The Decline of American Defense,`` from which this article is excerpted. Coates is The Tribune`s Denver correspondent, and Kilian is a Washington-based Tribune columnist. Copyright 1985 by James Coates and Michael Kilian. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc.

In surveying the course catalogues of the three institutions that produce the bulk of America`s military officers (the United States Military Academy at West Point, the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs and the Naval Academy at Annapolis), longtime congressional defense analyst Jeffrey Record complained the academies were turning out men and women indoctrinated in the methodology of procuring weapons but with little grasp of how to use them in war.

This procurement elite numbers in its ranks thousands of men and women whose careers rise or fall as a function of the ``success`` of the weapons project to which they`re assigned. As a weapon`s cost rises and more and more staff are added to the project, the officers in charge find ready promotions. Conversely, in the few cases where an officer finds a way to reduce costs and cut staff, the result can be a failure to receive a promotion. And, in the higher ranks, an officer who doesn`t move up moves out.

For nearly a decade Col. Robert Dilger headed the Air Force project to acquire ``tank-busting`` projectiles for its A-10 fighters. Eventually, Dilger was able to rid the project of costly bureaucratic rules and persuade two different companies to bid competitively on the ammunition contract--driving costs down dramatically. Dilger recalled in an interview that when he took over the project, there were military officers assigned to such absurd tasks as measuring the distance of work benches from factory walls to make certain they met military specifications. He found that Army, Air Force and civilian Defense Department bureaucrats responsible for the ammunition project had created ``one thousand pages of rules for just that one bullet.``

Dilger said he decided to ``throw out the book.`` He contacted the Aerojet Ordnance Co. and the Honeywell Ordnance Co. and offered each company a deal under which the only military specification would be the requirement that the shell fit the gun pod of an A-10 attack fighter and penetrate 2.11 inches of armor from a distance of 4,000 feet. The arrangement also stipulated that whichever company made the lower bid would get 65 percent of the business and the other bidder 35 percent. Bids were to be taken each year. That guaranteed, according to Dilger, that the two companies would try to outperform each other to gain the big part of the contract. Giving the loser a 35 percent share of the business assured that he would be around the next year for a fresh round of bidding.

The process produced a fiendish weapon, a foot-long shell with a uranium tip twice as heavy as lead that could rip through Soviet tanks and fill their interiors with molten metal. The shell was named GAU-8. It was designed for a Gatling repeating cannon carried by the A-10 that had a firing rate of 4,200 rounds a minute--70 a second. (The A-10 actually carried only about 1,100 shells, which were fired in bursts of several dozen at a time.) In tests conducted at Nellis Air Force Base against Soviet tanks captured in the Middle East, the A-10/GAU-8 system scored an impressive 80 percent success rate.

The bidding scheme was a great success as well. The budgeted cost of the shell dropped from $80 a round to $13 a round. Dilger was able to decrease dramatically the number of Defense Department personnel assigned to his payroll, and he turned back to the Pentagon $144 million in appropriated funds he hadn`t needed to spend.

But when his name came up for possible promotion to general, Dilger was passed over in favor of officers who had risen to their colonelcies on projects involving high-technology guided missiles--in Pentagon terms, more

``glamorous`` projects than his high-efficiency tank-killing weapon.

Today, Dilger runs a pig farm in Ohio. The Air Force has canceled the A-10 project, replacing the $13 A-10 shell with a $40,000, television-guided, heat-seeking Maverick missile.

The Maverick was first used in Vietnam. Its computer-guidance system was designed to interpret a black-and-white television picture of the combat area to distinguish an enemy tank from nearby rocks, trees or small buildings. This interpretation involved having the device choose between objects of varying shades of gray. Such an elaborate TV-computer set-up was deemed necessary if the Maverick was to be fired from a high-speed jet fighter instead of from the comparatively lumbering--but highly effective--A-10 war horses. The high speed of planes such as the F-15 made it much more difficult to see targets on the ground.